Cáncer, imaginario social y filmografía

Abstract

This article, summary of a non published book by “Apostar a la vida” foundation (Ramos Mejía hospital), tries to establish connections between cancer, as one of the most dreaded diseases of the XXth century, and the social imaginary, according to Bazko and Sontag comments and criteria. This research explored phenomenons of journalism, radio and television, but in this opportunity there are shown just some ways in which cinema, specially Hollywood’s cinema, exposed in it sown language socials and humans problematics produced by cancer. This disease was interesting for film’s fiction almost ten years after sound film appearance; the situation in the fifties, it’s characterized from the novel Rakobaby Korpus (1968) by Alexander Solzhenytzin and the film Magnificent Obssesion (1954) by Douglas Sirk; about 1970, movies like Love Story (1970) by Arthur Hiller or Shouts and whispers/ Viskingarochrop (1972) by Ingmar Bergman also focused, in very different ways, disease and their consequences. In the late XXth century and in the current XXI, many films have inquired into the treatment’s development and the existence of new healing’s methods which start to dismiss the equation “cancer equal to close and sure death” from the social imaginary.